Jessica Feldman

Primary tabs

Jessica Feldman

Assistant Professor

Professor Feldman joined the Global Communications faculty at AUP in 2018. Before that, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University, after earning a Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University in 2017. Her dissertation considered how advances in the surveillance of cell phone data, decentralized mobile networks, and vocal affective monitoring software are changing the ways in which listening exerts power and frames social and political possibilities. This research was funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation to support interdisciplinary research on privacy and democracy across the social sciences and engineering. She is also an artist whose work has been exhibited and performed internationally. She received an MFA from Bard in 2007 and taught media and sound art at Temple University and The New School from 2009-2012. She often collaborates with designers, and combines theory and practice in her teaching and her research.

Feldman’s current book project, Radical Protocols: Designing Democratic Digital Tools in Social Movements, is a study of the ways in which democratic values are (or are not) inscribed in the design of emerging networked communication technologies. The book is the result ethnographic fieldwork with democratic social movements, especially the “movements of the squares,” during which she studied these movements’ communications practices and the alternative digital tools that they designed to serve their political values. This is combined with a “values-in-design” analysis of new decentralized communication, consensus, and trust models, such as mesh networks, blockchain, and algorithmic governance applications, which claim to have democratic values. The book asserts the promise that peer-to-peer tools have for democratic practice in a moment when representative democracy is in decay, while pointing out concerns about the ways in which illegitimate power and control could be inscribed into these communication tools at lower layers.

Education/Degrees

Publications

“Strange Speech: Structures of Listening in Nuit Debout, Occupy, and 15M,” International Journal of Communication Volume 11: The Nuit Debout Movement: Communication and the Production of Everynight Life, May 2018.

"Schedules," Proceedings of Lines and Nodes: Media, Infrastructure, and Aesthetics Conference, New York University, 2014.

“The Trouble with Sounding: Sympathetic Vibrations and Ethical Relations in ‘Soundings: A Contemporary Score’ at the Museum of Modern Art,” Ear/Wave/Event: A Journal of Sensuous Intelligibility Issue One, April 2014.

“Affective Computing of the Speaking Voice and The Labor of Listening,” presentation at “Productive Sounds in Everyday Spaces: Sounds at work in science, art, and industry, 1920-present,” Max Plank Institute for the History of Science (Epsitemes of Modern Acoustics Research Group), Berlin, 2018

“The Problem of the Adjective:” Affective Computing of the Speaking Voice,” Society for the Social Studies of Science, Denver, CO, 2015

“The Problem of the Adjective:” Affective Computing of the Speaking Voice,” American Studies Association Annual Convention, Toronto, Canada, 2015
“MIDI: The cultural history and social life of a protocol,” Media Ecology Association Annual Convention, Metropolitan State University, Denver, CO, 2015

“The MIDI Effect,” Bone Flute to Auto-Tune: A Conference on Music & Technology in History, Theory and Practice, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 2014

“Sound Feeling: Sound, Affect, Emotion, and the Making of the Post-Modern Political Self,” Sound Signatures Winter School, Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2014